This is why we watch the films first time through.

The first time a film plays at Western Film the projectionist or I always sit and watch it or at least stay in the booth and keep an eye on it. Last night was the first showing of Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. It was fairly busy. As is the subset of Murphy's Law that applies to movie theatres we had problems tonight, not a quiet night like Street Kings.

First in reel 4 it went out of frame twice. In one case the top half of the screen was suddenly on the bottom! That's easy to fix while the movie is running by turning a knob. It happened in the middle of the reel so it had come in that way from another theatre. There was a reel change just after the second bad splice. I'd seen the film before so when people were suddenly returning injured and dead from a battle they had not yet fought I knew something was up. Reels 5 and 6 and been put in the wrong order so the battle occurred later in the film. A reel is about 15 minutes long.

I stopped the film and went up to the front and let the audience know what had happened. I said they could get their money back if they wished to leave now or watch the rest of the film and we would give them a free pass. Only a few left.

It was interesting that when I finished telling them they sort of clapped. I think it's because someone told them was had happened instead of just shutting the film off and sending them away as most theatres would have done. In most theatres no one watches the film so who knows how long it would have been before someone realized something was wrong. The rest of the film was fine after the two reels that played out of order.

I had planned to go home after the early show started but I had to wait around until the end of the night to fix Narnia. Unfortunately the late show, Iron Man, is long so it wasn't over until midnight.

I had put the small plastic cores trailers come on in the rolls of film to mark the places where there were problems. I then had to take the last few reels off to switch reels 5 and 6. This took a while since the film was no longer round with the cores in it. After I had the last few reels off I had to go into reel 4 and fix the bad splices. Whomever had last played it must have only played it once, they had obviously had it break on them a couple times and fixed it without making sure it was in frame. Both splices had been made badly. There really isn't a good excuse to make a bad splice in a CinemaScope film. The image fills the full frame so it's easy to tell where to cut. I fixed them.

After that was all done I put the film back on the platter, in the right order, and was finished. Altogether it took me 2 hours.

I'm writing this from the projection booth while keeping an eye on the Saturday afternoon showing of Narnia to make sure I fixed everything properly. So Far So Good.

This is the first time in since I started here in 2000 we've had reels out of order. The projectionist who last played it had mixed up the reels, my projectionist should have caught it but didn't. In his/her defense the images at the beginning of both reels were very similar so it would haven't have been hard to make the mistake.

Hopefully this doesn't happen again anytime soon.